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17 - JUN 12 - Jill H letter to TM/CD

The letters to the Prime
Minister and Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick were posted on
Tuesday (12 June) and I am awaiting replies which I shall post here.
I have also sent a copy to the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy
Corbyn. C'est moi qui souligne.

Monday 12 June 2017

Dear Prime Minister and
Commissioner Ms Cressida Dick

NEW DEVELOPMENTS SINCE
September 2016: The conduct of the Operation Grange investigation
into the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann

As before (voir lettre de septembre 2016), I write on
behalf of the members of my forum ‘The Complete Mystery of
Madeleine McCann’, whose membership has grown to 7,645 since my
previous letter.

I now write to you again
on your re-election as Prime Minister and as before wish you well in
that capacity.

You and the new
Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Ms Cressida Dick, will recall that
nine months ago, I wrote to you in robust terms about the truth about
what really happened to Madeleine McCann. I gave you, in particular,
detailed evidence about the misconduct of the various private
detectives and agencies used by the McCanns. They had used a series
of discredited or bogus investigation agencies - and at least four of
their detectives had been imprisoned for criminal offences after they
had been engaged by the McCanns. Two of their investigators, Kevin
Halligen and Antonio Giminez Raso, each served four years in jail.
Yet Operation Grange has deemed that the material collected by these
criminal or discredited investigators is somehow worthy of
consideration.

I suggested to you
previously that the expensive farce that Operation Grange had become
should be ended, and that you should set up a fresh inquiry team,
with an unlimited remit, which could investigate whether the McCanns
were directly involved in any way in the reported disappearance of
their daughter.

There have been at least
three major developments since I last wrote to you, which fully
reinforce what I said back in September - and make it more urgent
than ever that Operation Grange is ended and a new inquiry set up
with an unlimited remit.

These are:

(1) The original
Portuguese police investigation co-ordinator, Dr Gonçalo Amaral,
winning, in January this year, the libel case brought against him in
June 2009 by the McCann.

(2) The clear declaration
by the Portuguese Supreme Court, announced in February this year,
that the McCanns had been wrong to claim that they had been ‘cleared’
by the Portuguese police investigation. The Court ruled (a) that the
McCanns had NOT been cleared, (b) that the alleged criminal offence
of the McCanns, i.e. having hidden Madeleine’s body, was still
being investigated, and (c) that proceedings against the McCanns
could still be taken if new and credible evidence of their
involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance were to emerge.

(3) The revelation in
April this year by a former senior Metropolitan Police officer,
Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, that he had been advised by a
very senior Metropolitan Police officer that he should not accept the
recommendation of the former Head of the Child Exploitation and
Online Protection Service, Jim Gamble, that he (Sutton) should head
the proposed Operation Grange Review - because it would have a
strictly limited remit and he would “not be able to go where he
wanted”.

Moreover, in later
remarks discussing the advice the ‘very senior’ officer had given
him, Sutton stated in a SKY News documentary, and in an interview
with an Australian TV network, that he had reasons for believing that
the McCanns might , after all, have been involved in Madeleine’s
disappearance.Sutton a surtout observé que re-lire le dossier d'une affaire exigeait de commencer par le commencement, sans restrictions.

In my previous letter I
respectfully reminded you as follows :

“Whilst you were at the
Home Office you personally approved and organised the setting-up of
Operation Grange in 2011 and approved its remit, which was to
investigate the abduction. The innocence of the McCanns in the
disappearance of the daughter was assumed to begin with and so,
contrary to all normal rules of police investigation and conduct, any
lines of enquiry which might suggest that the McCanns knew or were
involved in the disappearance of Madeleine were excluded right from
the start.

As Home Secretary from
2010 to 2016 you would have had regular briefings on the case from
your most senior advisers, civil servants, and security service and
police officers and you would no doubt have been fully informed of
the intensive involvement of government security services and other
agencies in the case from the very first day, and their continuing
extensive involvement for many years later.

You must have personal
knowledge that the McCanns have by no means been ruled out of
involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance”.

At the end of January
this year, after a legal process that lasted over 7½ years, the
Portuguese Supreme Court refused the McCanns’ appeal against a
ruling in the Portuguese Appeal Court in April 2016 that the original
Portuguese investigation co-ordinator was not guilty of libeling the
McCanns in his book on the case: ‘The Truth of the Lie’. His
book, published back in 2008, had given clear evidential reasons for
believing that Madeleine McCann had died in the McCanns’ apartment,
and that they had covered up Madeleine’s death and arranged to hide
her body.Il n'a jamais été question de diffamation dans ce procès. Les MC ont demandé une compensation pour dommages créés à leur famille par la thèse de Gonçalo Amaral.

The comments of former
Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton

I now reproduce some of
the statements made by former Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton.
In a SKY TV documentary on the Madeleine McCann case, he said::

I did receive a call
from a very senior Met Police officer who knew me and said it
wouldn't be a good idea for me to head the investigation on the basis
that I wouldn't be happy conducting an investigation being told where
I could go and where I couldn't go, the things I could investigate
and the things I couldn't...

There were critical
errors because of a high level agenda to not interrogate the child's
parents.... Operation Grange's
narrow remit to focus only on the theory that the four-year-old was
abducted from the family's holiday apartment in Portugal was unusual
and a 'missed opportunity'...

The Australian article
continued:

In 2010...Sutton received a phone tip-off from 'a
very senior Metropolitan police officer', warning him about the
looming investigation and how it would be handled. The insider told
Sutton, who served 30 years with London's Met before retiring in
2011, that the dozens of murder detectives assigned to Operation
Grange would be instructed where they could and couldn't look. 'I
immediately assumed that what was meant was that the [McCann] family
and Tapas 7 [the group of seven friends on holiday with the McCanns]
were a no-go area', Sutton said.

The article went on

...the detective's instincts were proven correct. The 'crucial
phrase', as Sutton calls it, in the Operation Grange remit was a line
stating the review would be carried out 'as if the abduction occurred
in the UK'. That meant Kate and Gerry McCann, despite several
concerning inconsistencies in their witness statements, were not to
be looked at”, Sutton said. The rest of [the remit] is really of
little consequence after that because that's sort of saying…we are
only treating this as an abduction and we are not looking at any
other scenario.Sutton also hit out
at Scotland Yard claims that the McCanns...had been cleared...'The PJ
have never cleared anyone', Sutton said. ‘Ceasing the investigation
'just meant they couldn't find enough evidence to proceed against
them'.

Moreover, they quoted
more statements from Sutton:

Sutton...said it was well-rehearsed,
best police practice in cases such as Madeleine McCann to eliminate
those closest to the child first. 'Also any kind of investigation of
murder or akin to murder the other place you need to eliminate early
on is those that last saw the victim alive. In this case you've got
essentially the same group of people who are both close to the victim
and the last to see her alive. I'd always want to start with that. I
don't understand why that hasn't been done [by Operation
Grange]...'.

Sutton said he disagreed
with [Met Police] Asst Com Rowley's assessment. He said
inconsistencies in some of Kate and Gerry's statements, Kate's 2011
book ‘madeleine’ and also some of the witness accounts of the
Tapas 7 disturbed him.

After police found
no forensic evidence in the apartment to back up claims of a break
in, Gerry's statements to police detailing what doors he and Kate had
used while checking on their three sleeping children changed.

The article concluded:

Portugal's police also had some doubts over the accuracy of
timelines provided by Kate and Gerry, and the Tapas 7, in the
critical hours either side of Maddie being reported missing at 10pm.
Specialist cadaver and blood dogs were brought to Praia da Luz from
the UK, and signalled hits inside apartment 5A and a hire car rented
by the McCanns 25 days after Madeleine disappeared. [Colin Sutton
said that] It was 'entirely possible' that some of Operation Grange's
remit was forced upon Scotland Yard by government officials who
rubber stamped the multi-million-[pound] funding of the
investigation.

The comments of Assistant
Commissioner Mark Rowley

I also wish to refer to
the comments made by Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley about the
case in an extended interview given to the media.

He told his interviewer:

What I’ve always said on this case, and I’ve said it to Kate
and Gerry as well, we will do everything reasonably possible to try
and find an answer for them.

He thus confirms DCI Colin Sutton’s
statements that the remit, devised originally by Detective
Superintendent Hamish Campbell, excluded the McCanns from the
investigation.
In rambling responses to
the interviewer, AC Rowley said first of all that:

There is still
a lot unknown, but later contradicted himself by stating We’ve
achieved a complete understanding of it all. Later in the same
interview he contradicted himself once again by saying Ten years
on, we still don’t have definitive evidence about exactly what’s
happened, and further adding All the different hypotheses have
to remain open. In the same vein, he continued This case is
[one where] the evidence is limited at the moment as to which one of
the [various] hypotheses we should follow. So we have to keep an open
mind.

He continued:

As I
said earlier on we have no definitive evidence as to whether Maddie
is alive or dead but then, bizarrely, claimed The
investigation has achieved an awful lot.

He also referred to the
initial Portuguese investigation, stating that:

When we started,
we started five or so years into this, and there is already a lot of
ground been covered, we don’t cover the same ground, what we do is
pull all the material we had at the start, all the Portuguese
material…

This material included multiple lines of evidence that
Madeleine died in the McCanns’ apartment.

He then said:

It would
be no different if there were a cold case in London, a missing person
from 1990, we would go back to square one look at all the material
and if the material was convincing, it ruled out that line of
enquiry, we would look somewhere else…You don’t restart an
investigation pretending it doesn’t exist and do all the same
enquiries again, that is not constructive… What hypotheses does it
open, what does it close down…?

So, despite all the
material in the Portuguese police files pointing to Madeleine’s
death in the McCanns’ apartment, AC Rowley admitted that Operation
Grange ignored these lines of enquiry. To make it crystal clear,
Rowley confirmed that

We did not interview the McCanns as
potential suspects.

AC Rowley then developed
one of Operation Grange’s favourite hypotheses over the past few
years for Madeleine’s disappearance, namely a ‘burglary gone
wrong’. He said:

One of the lines of enquiry, one of the
hypotheses was: could this be a burglary gone wrong? Someone is doing
a burglary, panicked maybe by a waking child, which leads to
Madeleine going missing.

The interviewer retorted, very sensibly: Most burglars would just run out.

AC Rowley, aware that nothing
had been stolen from the McCanns’ apartment even if this was a
’burglary gone wrong’, replied with yet another rambling,
200-word answer, and admitted that, three years after identifying
three Praia da Luz residents as the possible burglars, we have
pretty much closed off that group of people.

The arrest and
questioning of these three alleged ‘burglars’ was based on
records of one mobile telephone call made between two of them lasting
58 seconds at 9.51pm on Thursday 3 May, the night Madeleine was
reported missing. This was the one and only piece of evidence against
them, and it was achieved after Operation Grange sifted some 11,000
mobile ‘phone records obtained from some 31 countries of people
known or thought to have lived in or visited Praia da Luz at the time
Madeleine was reported missing. To achieve this, letters had to be
sent by Operation Grange to 31 countries to obtain these records, and
thousands of man-hours would have been needed to examine them all.
The only result of this vast amount of expensive activity was the
wrongful arrest of three local Praia da Luz residents.

1. Appoint independent
assessors of proven integrity and independence to evaluate the work
of Operation Grange, and make its findings public. In this respect,
may I remind you of this part of the review’s remit, as determined
by DCS Hamish Campbell: The ‘investigative review’ will be
conducted with transparency, openness and thoroughness… Any such
report must include a full investigation into the huge involvement in
this case of MI5, Special Branch and other government or
government-backed security agencies;

2. Appoint, via the new
Home Secretary, a different police force, which has the highest
possible reputation for integrity and independence, to investigate
the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann;

3. Ensure that any new
police investigation has an unlimited remit and can therefore go to
wherever the evidence leads them;

4. Order the relevant
government department to investigate all aspects of the operation of
the Find Madeleine Fund, including:
-investigating the actions
of all of its Directors,

-the funding of the
private investigations,

-whether or not funds have
been used to pay the McCanns’ legal fees and expenses,

-why it was necessary for
a separate account to be set up last year, to be controlled by the
McCanns and not the Directors, and

-accounting for all monies
paid into and from the Find Madeleine Fund since it was set up in May
2007..

I shall again send this
same letter to the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida
Dick. Again I urge you to seek an urgent meeting with her to discuss
the contents of my letter.

In the three years and
eight months since a BBC Crimewatch ‘McCann Special’ on Madeleine
McCann on 14 October 2013, one of my members, Richard Hall, has
produced five documentary films on the case lasting a total of 17
hours. These films have had over 5 million views on YouTube alone.
The films developed the evidence that Madeleine did indeed die in the
McCanns’ apartment and that Gerry and Kate McCann, with the help of
others, hid her body. There are in addition literally hundreds of
other YouTube uploads by other Google members which also develop this
evidence, many of them having a large number of views.

Another member of mine, a
retired police superintendent, has published an e-book documenting in
detail the evidence that Madeleine died in the McCanns’ apartment.
It has been re-published all over the internet and has been read by
hundreds of thousands at least. In these ways, ever more people are
realising, in line with what Colin Sutton was told in May 2010, that
Operation Grange is a sham investigation which was deliberately
designed to cover up what really happened to Madeleine.

It would surely be in
your interests to admit that Operation Grange was seriously flawed
from the start and must be urgently replaced with a new investigation
with an unlimited remit.

Please give this matter
your most careful consideration and I shall look forward to your
response in the near future.